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Dylan Blackzorn looked around at the engine room with an annoyed expression on his face. The raiders had caused a hell of a mess in there. A fair amount of damage, too from the looks of things. He signaled for the others with him to follow his lead; they needed to be sure there weren't any surprises waiting for them before they got to work bringing the various systems back online.
He flexed his fingers inside the energy glove on his left hand. In addition to being a great asset in the hand to hand combat they'd had to engage in with the raiders, it was also a powerful tool. With it, he'd be able to engage with the ship's engineering computer and ascertain what repairs were going to be necessary, as well as to dramatically shorten the time those repairs would take.
Time to get to it, he thought. The sooner they were out of this sector, the better.
He really does have a face, and it looks pretty decent in person....sigh.
I'll have to go back and try to make it stand out a little more.

I have a soft spot for Traveller deck plans, and this set reminds me of the old Azhanti High Lightning box set which was incredibly useful.
About
Welcome to the Element family of cruisers, one of the mainstays of the Imperial Navy and a common sight throughout the Third Imperium and beyond.
This Kickstarter project is to create a brand new box set for the Traveller roleplaying game, detailing the three main classes of cruiser within the Element cruiser family, together with 10 massive double-sided blueprints that will allow you walk through each deck of the ships as if you were there...
You can download preview PDFs showing some of the content right here:
Excerpt from Handbook Fore Section Blueprint
The Element Cruiser Ship Builder's Blueprints box set will contain:
Ten gigantic (28" x 40") two-sided, full colour blueprints, laying out every deck of the ship.
One full colour, 64 page book covering the three main cruisers of the Element family, along with full High Guard game rules and optional ship equipment.
Serving On Board A Cruiser
We have done deck plans for every ship covered in this edition of Traveller, but we have seen a chance to really knock the ball out of the park and 'super detail' one of the largest ships in the Imperial Navy.
Each blueprint has been meticulously worked upon, and includes revisions and optional equipment, allowing you to tailor your own Element cruiser to specific mission roles.
The accompanying book sets the scene for cruisers and how they are used in Charted Space in general and the Imperial Navy in particular, then follows the design process of the Element family, from initial navy specification to maiden voyage.
The Element cruisers have a highly flexible 'pod' system that allows them to be configured for specific mission roles, and we have covered them in this book - from the 'standard' missile pod fit most commonly used on these ships, to long-ranged strike craft, light carriers, troop transports, and orbital assault ships, all are possible with the Element cruisers and have been included.
This has necessitated the introduction of an expansion to High Guard, detailing the new ship options now available.
However, this box set is about more than the hardware, and the duties of each individual crew member are examined, along with their integration into the full complement of the ship, commanding officers and security access.
We have gone into a lot of detail with these ships, in the handbook as well as the blueprints themselves!

I cleaned up my painting space this weekend, which made it much more inviting:
So, with my significant other off on a business trip early this morning, there was little to keep me from queuing up the podcasts and painting as long as I could stand it.
I finished a couple of vintage TSR Star Frontiers ships, for generic SF usage:
In the vintage SF line, I also did a simple paint scheme on two Grenadier Traveller Imperial Marines, acquired fairly recently from eBay:
I had these two Airfix Robin Hood figures started at Thanksgiving. According to the Plastic Soldier Review, these figures were originally released in 1964. While the mold has been in production fairly recently, I noted, from the color of the plastic, that these two are ones that have been in my possession since time immemorial (i.e., sometime around 1972-4), which is a long time to wait to be painted:
These Caesar 1/72 elves are a command stand for my fantasy mass battles using Hordes of the Things rules:
They’ve been waiting a while, too. My younger son made the gonfalon for me, topped by an earring we found in the parking lot at the ice rink. He retired from skating in 2012, and I’m glad the muses were finally with me today on this project.
10 figures, 8 from primer out...

So I hear Paizo's got this new game, Starfinder, up and coming. And I am not sure what to think.
Pathfinder filled a need; I tried 4th Edition D&D, and did not much care for the radical changes after several years of 3.5. Pathfinder was just an extension of the d20 system, and worked well as a generic fantasy game ... that, as splatbook after splatbook and so forth, grew steadily less generic. Still a fine game, although it begins to show signs of splatcreak*, as the sheer amount of rules pile up.
Makes sense they'd want to expand their base of gaming; a one-game company is vulnerable to changes in the market, and D&D has finally gotten its head on straight. Time to seek out new life and civilizations... if only to stay competitive.
But I dunno.
First science fiction RPG I ever played was Traveller, which did an amazing job of distilling the basics down to three little booklets in a box, which seems to be how things were done, then. We had combat, we had spaceships, we had computers, find a ship, find a crew, find a job, keep flying. It worked. (I will not discuss Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha; while I enjoyed 'em, these were more postapocalyptic and less space opera, and this is hard enough to keep on track as it is).
Another game, Space Opera, was interesting and fun, although waaaay too in love with its rulesset; as I recall, you could burn a whole gaming session just creating a character. Which I guess was a little better than Traveller, where you could accidentally get killed before your character entered PLAY, but Space Opera's extra crunchy rules were a bit much, even for the times.
I enjoyed Star Frontiers, once TSR finally got off their duffs and designed a neat space opera setting, although I took it kinda personally that they did not include a starship design or purchase system, or for that matter much of any information about space travel other than "buy a ticket." What, Traveller could do it, but you can't? They were up front enough, though, about the fact that they'd be out with a separate boxed set that would include the starship rules... eventually. And they did.
Aaaand that's where we take a sharp left, because Star Frontiers was the last generic science fiction space opera I ever played.
FASA quickly came out with a licensed Star Trek game, set during the TOS era, because that's all we had back then; Next Generation was still years away. Still remember the one adventure we played as Klingon officers, who wound up blowing up the ship due to a complex web of backstabbery... but I digress. Not long after that, they also came out with a licensed Doctor Who game, which preoccupied us for a while, as there were a hell of a lot of VHS tapes to track down to keep up with the setting! It did have the advantage of spreading across all TIME, as well as space... although we took a break when West End Games's Star Wars came out, because to a nerd-child of the seventies, the history of mankind breaks down into pre-SW and post-SW. After all, you never saw any Planet Of The Apes RPGs, did you? Hell, I still have a copy of Leading Edge's Aliens RPG around here somewhere; it was fun, albeit rather sketchy, as it was based entirely on the two movies in the Alien franchise as of 1988... had plenty of information about Weyland-Yutani, the Space Marines, the Aliens... and nearly nothing else...
Which brings us to now. As I said above, Pathfinder filled a need.
But there are a great many licensed science fiction games now. Firefly is still going strong. A new Star Wars game still circulates, albeit unsupported due to licensing. A new Star Trek game is in the works, assuming its maker ever gets it out of playtesting, and the current Doctor Who game still seems to be selling.
Is there a place now for a generic science fiction setting? Will it appeal to people who've never tried Pathfinder? Or does the current market favor established licensed science fiction settings where one can watch a movie or three and get an idea INSTANTLY about the world and how it works?
Opinions? Ideas? Rants?

Okay,
So the crew is back together for a new campaign. The guy running chose Traveller. So I need a new fig. My guy was 7 terms navy, with a frozen watch mishap and a bad aging roll in the 5th term. Taking hits to Str, Dex and End. He muster out a Capt, age 42. I see him with a cane or leg braces from the frozen watch incident, military bearing but not necessarily in uniform. Any Ideas for a fig would be great, if its from a line other than Reaper that would be fine with me, but Reaper is always my go to fig producer.